Afterimage
by Duce-Gemini
Summary: He hadn't wanted to go. But going would have been far better than the "salvation" that awaited him. The Doctor awakes not as a new man in a burning TARDIS, but as himself in a land of ash and nothingness. The beat of drums wasn't the only thing to come through before the Time Lock snapped shut, and now the Doctor must face one of the most terrifying relics of the Time War.
1. Prologue

Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who.

Author's Note: I figured I'd better upload this before "The Day of the Doctor" makes this completely AU and breaks my headcannon for the Time War. I actually started writing this right after Ten regenerated-kind of as a coping/grieving mechanism. This will be a short story, only three chapters or so, but it will be finished. I never start posting anything unless it is already completed-I'm just that slow. Comments and criticism is more than welcome. Enjoy.

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"I don't want to go."

They were his last words—well the last words for this go round. The next thing out of his mouth would be in a stranger's voice, formed in a strange mind. He'd have new teeth. If he hadn't been transfixed by the fire swelling in his marrow he would have laughed bitterly. No, _he_ wouldn't. He wouldn't do anything—ever again. The entity of the Doctor would go on, but he would be dead; just another set of memories and cast off clothes in the amalgam of the Doctor.

Only a few seconds, a scattering of heartbeats, and the regeneration would be over. He'd never been more aware of the fickle nature of time; the way it could creep through seconds like centuries and fossilize the present. Time roiled, rushing forward and yet he was frozen at the center of it, a stone battered in the middle of a stream. At once he had already changed, lost comprehension of himself, and been forced aside by some interloper, but he could still feel the regeneration moving through his system. Cell by cell the molten energy seeped through him; pooling, melting, reforming.

He had lifetimes to contemplate the change eating through his flesh as it compacted sinew and twisted bone. It was strange, but this would be the only time that would ever be his alone. These moments would be lost in the pain of regeneration and the egocentric confusion of a burgeoning personality. He grasped onto the moment—his last moment.

He'd seen the earth born; an insignificant plant cradled among the stars in what should have been the most boring galaxy in the cosmos. And he'd seen its people clawing out an existence at the end of the universe. He'd seen all that, but there was so much more. So much these eyes had never seen— would never see. Perhaps it was selfish, but he rather thought that the whole of space and time had never looked better than through these eyes.

The TARDIS shuddered. Deep in her core, the vortex thrummed in response to his spasming hearts. He was ripping apart. He fought the regeneration through every cell, clinging to _this_ body, _this _mind. The TARDIS didn't know what to do. She reached out, trying to calm him, help him. He thrust her off—savagely—he didn't want help changing. He wanted it to stop. Her heart twisted. This wasn't how it was meant to be. She was supposed to be easing him through the process as she had so many times before. But he fought her, shutting her out as she battered against the walls of his consciousness.

He was losing. Already a new version of himself shunted him to the side, his mind blurring as two personalities shoved against one another. Energy flared as he threw back his head. The tears dried in his eyes before they could touch his cheeks. This stranger in his head wanted life just as much as he did. And this new man had the strength to take it.

Not yet, not yet. Just a little longer. That was all he wanted. Another breath, another thought.

The TARDIS screamed. Fires surged through the grating. They both burned. The Doctor wanted to scream, but the mouth was no longer his. Darkness closed in. The last notes of his song faded into the stretches of the universe. He was out of time.

_I'm alone._

Across the Void, a blonde woman looked up into the night sky and began to cry. She didn't know why. The rangy man at her side pressed a hand against the ache in his one heart.


	2. Did You Follow the Drums?

Disclaimer: I do not own _Doctor Who_.

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The Doctor blinked.

Now that was wrong.

He shouldn't have been able to do anything at all. He was dead. He blinked again, the murkiness pressing his vision lifted a little. Maybe this is where past lives went when they died, continuing on tucked away in some dark corner of a Time Lord's brain. He shuddered. He was past. He was dead. He hadn't thought much about the regeneration process when he was younger, or what might lie beyond for the burned-out lives. It hadn't seemed like death then.

He extended a hand in front of his face. Through the gloom, he saw four absurdly long fingers waving in front of his eyes. Four fingers and one thumb. It was the same with the other hand. Tousling his hair, he felt the wild brush that he'd had since before Martha. And though he couldn't see it, he wagered it still wasn't ginger.

He was still him, was still the Doctor.

Pursing his lips together, he paused. Well, he was always the Doctor even when he wasn't him. When he died he'd still have been the Doctor, he just wouldn't have been him.

Wibeldy-wobbedly pronouns, he thought as his mind lost the burning sensation. Tenth, I'm the tenth one. He mentally checked off where this body fell in the succession of his lives. How strange that ten different, brilliant men—for despite what he'd told Rose, they were different in a way—should all share the same name and then be relegated to a number because of it. You die and you cease being the Doctor, he thought vaguely. You become a number…I'm a number. Ten.

Pushing off from the ground, he placed his hands over his hearts. They were beating. Erratic and rapid, but they were beating.

"I'm alive," he whispered. He clasped his throat. Still his voice. "Alive! Love that!" A smile spread across his face. He sank back to the ground and pulled his long knees into his chest. Maybe he wasn't just a number after all. Slow, steady drops darkened the cold ground and splashed across the brown and blue of his suit. He sat in the dark and the silence, and listened to his hearts.

Drawing in a shaking breath, he pulled his hands across his face, wiping them on his pant leg. He was sure he looked a fright, all red eyed and blotchy. Not his finest moment. But it didn't seem to matter since he was alone.

The TARDIS was gone, physically and psychically. An odd numbness lurked in his mind where she should have been; numb, like a wound so deep the body hadn't felt the pain. Yet, he thought, gritting his teeth.

Half-light and darkness encircled him, stretching into nothingness. There was a kind of ground beneath his feet, but it was neither organic nor artificial. It simply was.

For a panicked moment he wondered if perhaps he really was dead and this was some black recess of his mind.

"Are you lost too?" asked a voice.

Smiling in relief, the Doctor turned toward the voice. It carried a female cadence, a young one. This was no strange afterlife for his past selves. He had been many things, but a girl was not one of them.

"I suppose I am," he said, scanning the gloom. "If by lost, you mean not exactly sure where I am." He should be able to see the girl, her voice sounded close. "Where are you?"

"Here." The voice came again. The Doctor could just make out a shape at the edge of the shadows. "Did you follow them? The drums?"

He stiffened. "No. I don't know how I managed to get here."

A pale shadow detached from the darkness. The Doctor looked down into wary eyes as a girl slid forward. Her sallow skin gleamed through smudges of grime and filth. Knobs of scabby knees poked out from beneath the tattered edges of her grubby smock. The hem had been ripped away from the rotting fabric to make a belt, the twist of cloth wrapped three times around the girl's waist.

The Doctor smiled. " 'ello."

"Hello," mumbled the girl, her quick eyes following his movements from behind snarls of sweat slick hair. It could have been a kind of pale blonde, but dirt and ash deadened its true color.

"You're not dead are you?" he asked suddenly. " 'cause me, well, I think I might be. Don't want to be of course, but when you're supposed to be dead and you realize you're not," he clicked his tongue, "it raises some questions."

Stepping back, the girl wrapped her boney arms about herself. Raw, fire blasted fingers clenched dirty elbows.

The Doctor tried to smile again. "Aw, don't mind me. I just like to talk. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk—I'm a first rate rambler." The corner of the girl's lips twitched. It could have been the start of a smile, but it sat in her starved cheeks like a grimace. "I'm the Doctor by the way. And you are?"

The girl glanced away. She kicked at the ground with her bare feet.

"Right then. Do you know where we are?"

The girl nodded.

"Not on Earth I'll wager. Does this place have a name?" The Doctor raised his eyebrows.

The girl shook her head.

Running his hand through his hair so that it stuck out, the Doctor looked down at her. "So you know where we are, but it doesn't have a name? Well then, in this place that has no name, does the sun ever come up?" He hooked his thumbs in his pockets and rocked back on his heels, staring up at the swirling clouds.

"There is no sun," said the girl in little more than whisper. "But there is light." She slunk around the Doctor, keeping feet of the grey murk between them. "Follow me—Doctor."

Gathering his coat about him, the Doctor trailed after the girl. He ran a thumb down the worn fabric of the coat. I don't remember wearing this when I didn't die, he thought.

A wave of darkness washed over him, swallowing the girl's slight form. It weighed him down. The haze twisted around his feet and hung thick before him.

"This stuff is worse than the nomadic fogs of the Triclarion moons." The Doctor paused, his gaze probing. It reminded him a great deal of the living darkness in the Great Library. But, since his skin was still on his bones he doubted this was a pack of Vashta Nerada.

"Don't lose me, Doctor," came the girl's fog-muffled voice.

"I'm rather more afraid of you losing me," said the Doctor, still scanning the shadows. He glanced down. A splotch of red marred the not-ground. A little footprint. Cautious, he followed the crimson stain. The bloody smudges led into soft drifts of ash, the piles deepening about his trainers and rising in little drifting clouds with every step.

The fog began to thin. Ahead, a cold light seeped through the fog. The last shreds of darkness gave way to the misty light, and the Doctor stepped into what looked like a clearing. It was little more than an expanse of drifting ash. The dark fogs lapped at the clearing's edge, held at bay by the weak light.

A handful of skeletal trees, white flesh stripped of bark and leaves, careened out of the shadows, the mist snagged in veils between their brittle fingers. A tumbled heap of fire blackened stones scattered across the clearing; swells of grey flakes piled against their sooty sides.

"Cheery," said the Doctor, his gaze flicking around the expanse. Crouched on the far side, the girl continued to watch. "Are there other places like this? Clearings, oases, havens," his rattling list of words trailed off as he received no answer, "rest stops."

"What else could there be?" The girl's listless gaze roamed around the dim circle. "There isn't anything. Only darkness and silence."

"What makes this place so special than? There's nothing upon nothing and then suddenly this little patch of something. Where'd it come from?" he asked.

"I made it," said the girl.

"You! Made this?" asked the Doctor, stepping forward. "Clever girl."

The girl darted away and clambered up onto the rocks. She perched among the boulders, ready to throw herself into the darkness.

The Doctor paused, raising his hands in front of him. "Sorry, sorry. Didn't mean to startle you. It's lovely, really, it is. Could use some flowers or trees, though. Perhaps a patch of grass. You could put in a little shop, just there." He pointed beneath the twisted trees. "Why'd you go and choose such glooming scenery?"

The girl blinked. "There is nothing else."

The Doctor motioned toward the girl's raw feet, the skin livid beneath the blacked charcoal of dead flesh. "Right. Care to let me have a look at your feet?" he asked, watching blood ooze down the rocks. "I am a doctor after all."

Again, that wretched smile. "Not that kind."

"And how would you know that?" asked the Doctor, his voice dropping to a cautious lilt.

The girl lapsed into silence and nothing the Doctor said could elicit more than a dead-eyed stare. The ever shifting fogs swirled on. Sitting back, the Doctor's mind churned as he observed the slight figure before him. She appeared to be a little girl, but when he tried to really look at her, his mind glanced off. It was like it couldn't bear to look at the tattered husk. So there he sat, a supposed to be dead man studying a little girl that was and wasn't in a sea of substantial nothingness.

"Where's the light come from if there's no sun?" he asked, cocking his head to the side as he contemplated the shining mists above him.

Shrugging her thin shoulders, the girl looked up at the light. "It just is."

Digging about in his pockets, the Doctor searched for his sonic screwdriver. He patted down his sides and turned out his coat pockets. It wasn't there. Neither was anything else.

"Where's it all got to?" asked the Doctor. "They can't be empty, they just can't." He picked at the inverted lining. "Now this is a very strange thing; this place, my being alive, you—but the strangest of all is my pockets, my empty pockets. You see, they're not quite like regular pockets, or they're not supposed to be—bigger on the inside—but stick your hands in these and you're right to the bottom," he paused to breath, "which means that these are not my clothes. Not an illusion though, very real—just not mine."

This time the girl did smile; a hard, predatory smile. She pushed her stringy hair away from her face. Her brows furrowed over her snub of a nose. "You're quick to spot the imperfection."She darted across the space, her movements just a little too quick. Her eyes roved over the Doctor's face. "Still not quite right."

Reaching up, she could just brush her fingers along the Doctor's jaw. Her touch burned like ice. The Doctor jerked back, swallowing a groan. Pain sliced through his flesh; he was falling through the glass dome all over again. His limbs collapsed as he fell into the ash. Blood splashed across his hand, oozing from the cuts slashed across his face.

The girl's lips spread wide over little teeth, her eyes glinting in the dead light. "You took a nasty fall, Doctor." She drug her finger through one of the cuts as the Doctor looked up at her, his jaw clenched. She stuck her finger between her cracked lips and sucked it clean. "I like the look of it on you. Battle scars for the warrior of Gallifrey."

"What are you?" growled the Doctor, his brows snapping down.

"You're not going to invoke the Shadow Proclamation?" The girl pouted, her expressions twisting across her face in a mockery of humanity. "That's your back up plan isn't it? When the name of the last Time Lord doesn't strike fear." She swung her head downward, staring through her tangle of hair. "I tremble, Doctor," she said, deadpan.

The Doctor held her gaze with his own, staring into her sea grey eyes. "You know me, know that I can help. Let me help you."

"You wouldn't offer if you knew. We're already enemies, Doctor, enemies and allies." She shoved back her hair. "I'd never take help from you." Straightening, the girl's eyes rolled back in her head, the whites gleaming through her ragged lashes.

A wound in time tore open, never healing, always oozing. The perversion drove the Doctor to his knees. Knotted deep at the core of the maiming, he could feel the mutilated cords of broken timelines. The devoured possibilities of whole planets screamed. The gapping tear spat up deformed shadows and half-lives.

Raising his head, the Doctor forced himself to meet the girl's eyes. She was wrong. Looking at her drove nails through him. In the shadows of her eyes, Gallifrey burned, the red grass caught to cinder. Armies shrugged off death, twisted body and mind by the wrenching flow of time. Reality ripped open, spewing fleets of ships and never-meant creatures. He saw Hell. Hot wind scorched his face and the scent of charred flesh wormed into his mouth and nose. The Doctor tore his gaze away and focused on the ground, counting the ashy flakes.

The girl's shadow stretched long behind her, too long. It twisted and writhed. Needle-toothed horrors burst from its darkness, thrashing for an instant before the turmoil yanked them back, only to emerge as a terror with a new face. The shadow leapt into the fog.

"Do you know me now, Time Lord?" asked the girl. Her nostrils flared. "The scent of your fear. Incense for your Nightmare Child."

Bile crept into his throat as the Doctor buried his head in his shoulder. Drawing in haggard breaths, he swallowed hard, closing his eyes against the taint. Time roared. It crashed against itself, boiling away the past and the future, leaving only the charred brittle of the present.

One of his hearts seized. He dug into the ash with his long fingers. Gasping, he forced words onto a dry tongue. "Stop," he croaked, "stop, please, just stop."

"You once boasted that you looked on the Nightmare Child and laughed," said the girl, her young voice tinged with a dark echo. "Go on then Doctor, look on me and laugh—look at me!"

The Doctor crumpled to the ground, curled beneath the wrenching of time as it sliced through his body. His head rung with screams. He wrapped his hands around his ears.

"Please…please," he whispered.

The flow of time stilled and the voices in his head receded. The girl stood over him; her dark rimmed eyes once more grey glass. Her umbilical cord of darkness still stretched into the nothingness, just a shadow. The twisted horrors evaporated.

"You should have told them you laughed in despair." She watched him, unblinking. "Even the last of the Time Lords fears the Nightmare Child."

Uncurling, the Doctor staggered to his feet, absently brushing the blood from his face. He could look at her now, but his body raged with the memory of that sucking wound.

She was right. She did frighten him—and not in the adrenaline pumping way he loved. She was bone rending terror. He couldn't forget that terror; even veiled as a little girl with deep bruised, staring eyes.

He swallowed. "This is new," he said offhand, with a vague gesture. He almost succeeded in keeping the tremor from his voice. "The whole little matchstick girl look. Very Hans Christian Anderson."

Her lips twisted. "I am how I am."

"I saw you at the Battle of the Elysium Gates," he pursed his lips together, "the Nightmare Child swallowed whole ships. A rent that blotted out the stars. You stretched across two systems."

The girl inclined her head. She twitched her hand up, fingers ratcheting closed as she examined them. "I have always had this puppet flesh." She froze and her mouth twisted. "You tried to stop me from devouring Davros' ship." A cracking, hollow sound slipped from between her lips. "What kind of warrior tries to save their enemy? Another succeeded where you failed. Dalek Khan snatched Davros away." She snarled. "Davros was meant to die in the Time War."Running her tongue along her teeth, she shuddered. "The taste of spoiled inevitability."

"I had nothing to do with that," said the Doctor, his eyebrows disappearing into his ruffled hair. "That was all Khan's doing."

Settling back on the rocks, the girl looked up at the silver light. "Tell me Doctor, whose negligence allowed the Cult of Skaro to escape Canary Warf and allowed Dalek Khan to make his mad flight through time?"

"Allowed? I tried…"

"You. Failed," the girl spat. "And your actions nearly cost the universe its existence," she scented the air. "But in the end the cost was still high. The fiery one, she burned, your mind burned her up. You did this to her, to your…friend is the word."

The Doctor drew himself up, looming over the child. The muscles in his jaw tightened. "You don't talk about her."

Flicking her gaze up, the girl met the Doctor's eyes, fires burning deep within. "Do not forget to whom you speak."

"A horror, a breathing horror," he muttered, jerking his stare away.

"I am your god." She spread her hands wide. "Kneel in worship."

At this the Doctor laughed. "A god would have compassion. A rubbish god you'd make, all stringy and cruel and stained in blood."

In that we are alike, Time Lord. The words echoed in his head as he felt a foreign presence walking in his mind. A shadow ghosted through the twisting corridors and sudden stairs of his thoughts. He couldn't stop it.

His brow furrowed as he looked at the girl. "You can't be doing that," he said. He stepped back.

"You regenerated, Doctor. You flared and you changed. I had no need for this new man. I plucked your consciousness from the inferno, copied your mind." She shrugged. "What is a person but memories?" She circled him, her eyes flicking over his form. "Memories stitched into a new body."

"Not possible," he said.

"You cried out, a psychic scream tearing across the universe. It slipped though time to ring in the past and the future. I heard it above the fading drums." She reached up and grabbed him by his jacket. The Doctor grunted in surprise as she jerked him to his knees. She pushed her lips into a mocking pout. "So desperate not to go."

She traced a hand along the Doctor's shoulders, dragging a line across his back as she circled him. "The body was more difficult. I started from nothing." Her finger paused between his shoulder blades, giving a quick tap. "Every detail, exactly as you were."

"No," the Doctor whispered as he felt the rift open behind him. He hunched up. Shivering, he clutched at his coat as nightmares boiled out of the girl's shadows. Flowing together, vanishing, and reappearing, they latched onto the Doctor, their hands hard, biting ice. A half-faced horror oozed around his shoulder. A long, barbed tongue hung from its jawless mouth. Leaning in, it curled its tongue about the Doctor's face as he jerked away.

The nightmares surged forward, throwing the Doctor to the ground. They gripped his right arm and stretched it out into the ash. The girl circled, terrors shadowing her.

"I was faithful in every aspect." She paused. She placed her foot on his wrist and began to press. "A slight weakness there."

His face twisted as she continued to press. Bone cracked.

The Doctor screamed.

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Author's Note: Say hello to the Nightmare Child, everyone. Isn't she just darling? It's a shame that she remembered the Doctor had a slight weakness in the dorsal tubercle. Two more chapters to go. As always, constructive criticism is encouraged. I struggle with dialogue on a good day, and sometimes the Doctor is particularly hard to write.


	3. The Storm Has Come

Author's Note: I do not own _Doctor Who-_as cool as that would be.

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Cradling his broken wrist, the Doctor hunched under the skeletal trees. Beneath closed lids, his eyes flicked with incessant movement. His face calmed and he opened his eyes. The Nightmare Child crouched in front of him, her face pressed close to his.

"You've gone to a lot of trouble," he said. "Built up everything from scratch just to get at me. The attention is flattering, really. Most wouldn't go to this much trouble."

The girl reached up and ruffled his hair. "I like a brave face. Smiling at death. Always so serious, the other Time Lords. But not you." She leered at him. "We're going to have fun, you and I."

"You didn't answer my question." He was very calm.

"You have yet to ask it." She peered at the Doctor. "You were another man in the war, wore a different face. But it's not him you see when you allow yourself to remember." She let her hands hover over the Doctor's face, tracing his features in the air. "It's this face. For all your talk of forbearance. For being the man who would never," she licked her teeth as the Doctor winced. "You see yourself standing under the burning sky, these lungs blacking with ash and dirt and smoke." The backs of her fingers just bumped against his. "This hand was made for a weapon."

"A fighting hand," he muttered.

"What a fearful sight you were on the battle field. Fury and destruction. The On Coming Storm the Daleks called you. What would they call you now, Doctor?" She leaned down close to the Doctor's ear. "The Storm has come. It didn't take much to turn the Lonely God into a Devil."

He closed his eyes.

The Nightmare Child pulled back as the Doctor clambered to his feet. "And that's enough about me. Let's talk about you." He gestured as grandly as he could with one hand. "Let's talk about the Time War's own abomination."

The child knelt in the dust, threading her thin fingers through her hair. "How I was hated—feared." She began drawing in the dust, humming snatches of an old Gallifreyian lullaby. "Would they have made songs about me, to frighten the children?" Her lips jerked into a frown. "If there had been children left. All those little hearts stopping dead with terror when the Dalek's shattered Haven. Doubly silent hearts." The girl's hand strayed to her chest.

"That's not going to work," said the Doctor as he turned back to the child.

"Telling the truth?" She shrugged. "It would have been better if your own had been swallowed up in the silence. Better than being spattered across the breadth of the Time War. There was only one left for you to kill when the Moment fell into your hands."

A ghost rose in the Doctor's mind. A face he had kept locked away, forgotten. She looked just as she did the last time he'd seen her. The war had thrown her into her third regeneration, a young woman with a slender build and delicate, elfin features. Her strawberry-blonde hair twisted into a loose braid that nearly brushed her heels. His little Rho.

She had stood against him at the end. The Doctor remembered the way her milky complexion had flushed as she drank in Rassilon's heresy. The way she had pleaded with him to join them, dissolve into purity and fly beyond the destruction of all things. Finally, they would have total mastery over time, and there would be no need for fetid bodies ticking through regenerations. His lives were draining away, and then his teeming mind would be silent. He should join them. They were too vast for this existence.

The worst had been her eyes; large lakes of sharp blue that gleamed with a feverish light. They had been so bright and horrible. Such hungry eyes. When he had seen her, his hearts cracked. His little child—how else could he see her, but as a little girl shrieking through the grass—had become a monster.

He'd taken the Moment and ran. The TARDIS welcomed him as he curled at the base of the time rotor and cried, unable to shake the image of Rho standing shoulder to shoulder with Rassilon as he preached his madness. He couldn't forget how she looked with her ceremonial robes thrown over blackened armor. Her mind had echoed after him, calling him traitor, coward, and all the while cajoling in that incessant way she had, that he should come round to their way of thinking. The Time Lords had this right, it was their destiny to ascend beyond these flimsy bodies and this universe with its sentients still crawling in the mud.

He'd heard her voice above all the others as the Moment bloomed and Gallifrey burned. He'd wished she'd called him traitor then. The fires ate up her voice, but he heard it in the silence and the darkness between the stars. A little voice calling for her father to save her.

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Author's Note: Shorter update this time, but giving a bit more of a glimpse into the war. Strangely "The Day of the Doctor" didn't make this as AU as I thought it would-in fact, with a few very small tweaks, this could probably still work with cannon. I have trouble writing the Doctor sometimes, especially his dialogue, so constructive criticism is welcome. Sometimes he starts talking and I can see David Tennant doing the lines and it's great-other times well...less so. R &R!


	4. Casualty of War

Disclaimer: I do not own _Doctor Who_-or even the Nigtmar Child.

A/N: All right, y'all, here it is. The last chapter. Now we get some answers-some more thorough than others. My thanks to those who have reviewed. I always find it so encouraging that someone would take the time to comment on my work.

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The Doctor dragged his hand over his face, long fingers pulling at his features. He blinked. Suddenly, he was working off his tie, pulling at it with nimble fingers. He wrapped it tight about his wounded wrist, tucking the ends into a messy knot. He frowned. The Doctor grabbed the end of the tie in his teeth and pulled, trying to tighten it.

The Nightmare Child sighed. She pulled the Doctor's hand to her, ignoring his yelp of pain as her fingers closed over his wrist. She twisted the ends into a savage knot.

The Doctor tried to stretch his grimace into an appreciative smile. His features settled into an inquisitive expression. "Why?"

The child blinked, surprised. "Why not?"

"Well, I'd hate to be the one to break protocol, but typically a torturer doesn't help the torturee," the Doctor leaned back, "I am the torturee, aren't I?"

The child threw back her head and laughed, the sound scratching out of her throat. "Oh Doctor, we're only playing." She drew her toe through the ash. "You like games, don't you?" She finished sketching something like a hopscotch grid in the drifts. She hopped through the intricate pattern, little feet flashing from square to square. There was something sickening about her movements, as if she had to move every bone in her body one at a time.

Her mess of hair spread out around her as she spun on one foot. It drifted back around her shoulders as she paused, peering out from behind the greasy strands. "I can never finish it." A series of red scuffs marred the game board. With an irritated wave of her hand, the child blew it all away.

"You've made a mess of your feet," said the Doctor.

"I also made a mess of your face."

"Seems to me, though, that it's getting worse," mused the Doctor, thinking aloud.

The child gritted her teeth before sliding up beside the Doctor. For an instance her shadow pulsed and the Doctor shied away.

"What were you doing at the Medusa Cascade, when you tried to steal Davros from me?" the child purred. "Out on the far reaches of the war in that funny little box. Oh, your TARDIS hated me. You could hardly get her near me, the repulsive wreck."

The Doctor glanced at the child. Then he shrugged.

"Don't you want to swap the stories of war, Doctor, with an old soldier at arms?" asked the child, perching on the rocks.

The Doctor watched her in silence. An air of distracted curiosity settled over him as he turned in a circle, gaze flicking over the clearing. He managed a smile of weak bravado.

"Aren't you a bit old for story time?" he asked.

"I'll tell one then," she patted the rock at her side. "Sit."

"I'm fine really. Standing that is. Been," he swallowed, "dying of radiation poisoning all day. Much rather stand. It's been more than a day now hasn't it, though. Time's got a way of getting away from you here. Even from me."

"Sit. Down," said the girl.

The Doctor stumbled as a tremor ran through the ground. The child smiled, like a viper stretching its lipless mouth over its fangs. The Doctor sighed. "All right." Pulling his coat tight he perched as far from the Nightmare Child as he could manage.

"Once upon a time," she paused, "that is how these go? Once upon a time, long ago, in a faraway land, something like that." The girl twisted her hair. "That's how stories start. I think. Once upon a time." The child curled her mouth around the foreign phrase. "Upon time. There was a man, the most bloodstained pacifist to ever walk among the stars…"

The Doctor leapt to his feet. "You know what I think? I think I've heard this one before." He gazed at flames long since burnt to ash that wouldn't start to spark for centuries. "I know how it ends." The silence snatched at his words as they hung on the still air. "Still, let's hear the part about how the fear made flesh got thrown back into the Timelock with all the other monsters." He leaned down, a superior tone creeping into his voice. " 'cause that's all you are now, just a monster under the bed."

A gleaming smile split his features. "Look at you. A demon embodied and here you are playing mind games." Leaping to his feet, the Doctor waved his good hand expansively. " 'Cause all of this, this is nothing for the Nightmare Child. A parlor trick. I was there at the Third Cacophony when you crawled out of a rift, the heart of a TARDIS clenched in your jaws. Time wept." He raised his eyebrows. "But look at you now."

The child clenched her fists at her sides, shaking.

"You're just an echo that bled through with Gallifrey. The Timelock snapped shut," the Doctor snapped his fingers, "and you got stranded here. You've got nothing to feed off now, no war, no lost regenerations." He leaned in. "You've been using up what power seeped through with you."

The Doctor mused. "Like a chick feeding off its yolk."

A snarl curled the child's lips. Her shadow boiled up, dark shapes writhing. Tendrils snaked about the Doctor's ankles and yanked his faded trainers out from under him. Ash billowed as the Doctor landed on his back with a grunt.

He yelped as the dark tendrils jerked him forward, leaving a long trail through the ash. Vaporous shadows swarmed over the child's body, twisting it into a perversion. Venomous eyes snapped open, swirling with dead men's souls.

"I starve," she said, her voice shaking.

The Doctor groaned as the nightmares wrenched him to his knees, the child's hands gripped his temples, digging into his hair. Needle fangs showed beneath curled lips as the child rumbled deep in her throat. "All the lives you've ruined, the people you've turned into weapons. Admit it Doctor, you're a plague. Everything you touch burns."

A cry ripped from the Doctor's lips as the child tore through his mind. People were dying. In Pompey their lungs melted and families huddled beneath the falling ash. Hundreds of people flared under the heat of a Dalek's malice. Soldiers fell in heaps, carcasses of war across the universe. A little girl with a red balloon stared out from the depths of a mirror. Gallifrey screamed.

Tears spilled onto the Doctor's cheeks as the child bored deeper into his mind. Rose tumbled toward the void. He couldn't reach her. She fell into eternity. The cold ocean crashed behind her as salt tears ran down her chin.

And then Rose's arms were around him as she buried her head in his chest. His arms snaked about her, holding her tight. He lifted her up and spun. When he set her back on her feet Martha stared up him instead, giving a bright smile. The Doctor bent down and hugged her. Martha's dark hair blushed red and Donna pulled away from him. She smirked and elbowed him in the arm, motioning to the side with a jerk of her head.

The Doctor blinked. For a moment the images of Sarah Jane, Mickey, Wilf, and a dozen others ghosted across his vision. The presence in his mind faltered. A brief sob echoed in the darkness. The Doctor reeled as the child fled. As she bolted, he caught a glimpse into her mind, just a flash.

A bare shouldered girl clambered through dark trunks, silver leaves caught in her hair. Laughing, she spun in the dappled light. She paused as if listening to a far off call. Suddenly she shrieked, curling on the ground, clutching her head. A concussive wave of energy tore through the forest, smashing against an unseen barrier and rolling back upon itself. The Time War rippled through the ages and crashed against the farthest edges of the Time Lock. The child shuddered and writhed in the ash, the silver leaves falling in cinders. Naked trunks stretched above her.

A jagged rift in time tore open. It swallowed her. Her scream echoed in the emptiness. Then a sallow hand grasped at the edge of the rift. The child heaved herself up, one arm and then another out of the hole. Suddenly, a man in red robes stood before her, his high, sculpted collar shadowing his face. She reached out a hand to him, pleading. He threw her back in and the rift snapped shut.

The Nightmare Child's mind jerked away from the Doctor, hidden behind a tangled mass of dark thoughts. The shadows melted and for an instant the Doctor thought he saw dampness on her cheeks. She threw herself away from him, clutching her arms against her chest. Back stiff, she refused to look at him. "I don't understand," she whispered. "All that in your mind, how can it be?" She turned and looked up at him, searching. "You are rage and pain and malice. You are sorrow and death."

The Doctor watched her. She seemed to diminish somehow and for a moment he was able to forget she wasn't a little girl.

"You are joy and fun and hope and," she hissed as if the word burned her, "love. So very many love you. Even after the monsters you've become." She blinked rapidly. "I do not understand."

The Doctor smiled thinly, giving a weak shrug. "You're not the only one."

A bitter laugh escaped the girl's lips as tears trailed through the grime on her face. She reached a tentative hand to her cheek, confused by the wetness there. "This is weakness." She looked into the Doctor's face. "Get out. You wanted to live so much. Live," she sneered.

"You're—letting me go?" he said glancing down at her.

She gave that pained smile. "Letting? I'm just an afterimage. A fading echo. You've taken my war. What is one more lost death after that?"

The light was growing brighter and the Doctor realized he could see farther into the shifting clouds than ever before. A vast emptiness stretched beyond his sight. The world about him began to blur and change. The rocks and battered trees faded. Even the ash beneath his feet curled in on itself.

"You get a second chance, Doctor." The girl haltingly furrowed her brows, control of her body slipping, "This thing is irony." The not-world of the Nightmare Child's creation ate itself, the edges dissolving into brilliance. "Go on Doctor," she curled her lips, "be loved."

Dropping to his knees in front of the child, the Doctor looked her in the eyes. He looked past the grey glass and burning pits, down into black loneliness. "Thank you," he said, and wrapped his arms about the girl's little body. She stiffened at his touch and he felt her mind jerk back. She pushed away for an instant before sagging against him and dropping her head onto his shoulder.

"I escape the Time War," she mumbled and gave a little hacking laugh, "and you are still my death."

The Doctor whispered, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, little lost child of Gallifrey."

The brilliance engulfed him and he felt the child begin to burn away. And then, there was nothing. No ground beneath his feet, no air in his lungs; he was blind and deaf and mute. Somewhere in the back of his mind he heard Donna commenting on it not being such a bad thing for him to be speechless. Throwing back his head, he laughed into the vacuum. Slowly, the sound reached his ears. He couldn't feel his hearts or his hands, but his laugh echoed.

And then he stood on a hillside, green, green grass beneath his feet. The last ring of his laughter drifted across the sunlit sky. He lifted his battered face, drawing in the sweet air. A muffled cry caused him to look down. He still clutched the child to his chest.

With a moan, she pushed away from him, her strength frail. He let her go and she tumbled backward onto the ground. Blinking, she threw an arm up against the sun. She trembled as her gaze jerked wildly from the bright sky to the ground beneath her to the Doctor looming over her.

"What did you do!" she hissed.

"Oh, I am brilliant." The Doctor grinned and rocked back on his heels. His hand fluttered about as he talked, doubly expressive as if to make up for the fact that the other hung limp at his side. "You bled through into this time, but not all of you squeezed through before Gallifrey got tossed back into the Timelock. You got cut off, didn't have anything to anchor yourself here, well you could have made something, course you could have, all that power, you could do whatever you liked. Thing is, you wasted a lot of your energy on me—rather petty." He shook his head. "Spiteful child. You couldn't get at the Time Lords; but you could get at me."

The Doctor's trainers rustled through the grass as he began to pace. "That's not quite right though is it? You couldn't get at me either, not really. The TARDIS kept you out, oh yes. She doesn't like you at all. So you couldn't just snatch me away. And that's why the whole cloning rubbish—I'm starting to rather hate cloning." The Doctor wrinkled his nose and pulled a face. "Really," he said, voice cracking over the word, "you could have just waited till I left the TARDIS, would have been easier." He paused and cocked his head to the side in thought. "Could have brained me with a cricket bat."

The girl shrieked and lunged at the Doctor. He caught her little wrist in his hand and held her as she struggled. "See, what you needed was something to anchor you in this time and place." The girl screamed again and struggled. The Doctor let her go with a swift step to the side. She landed in a heap in the grass. "You'd been in my mind, waltzing around, and that left a trail. It wasn't much, but it tied us together. That, and you really shouldn't have let me hug you. The mental link wasn't enough, but a nice big strong hug—nothing like it! And there you are, I'm your anchor." The Doctor held up his hand and waved his fingers at the child. "Hello!"

For a moment, the girl sat in a heap, legs sprawled, burying her hands in her tattered dress. Her fingers trailed up the fabric, scuttling onto her arms as she felt her way up them, pinching, pulling, and grabbing at her skin. Her hands roved over her face, tangling in her hair as she began to shake. Suddenly, she stopped, her arms dropping limp to her side.

"Show me your fury, Doctor," she said, her voice barely a whisper.

"What?" he asked.

"Give me just what I wanted." She raised her face, expressionless. "Make it poetry."

The Doctor paused and considered the child. "Poetry?"

"My judgment, be poetic."

"That's what you think this is? A sentence?" He laughed. He ran a hand over his face, suddenly solemn. "Well, maybe for me."

The girl hunched against the ground. "I do not understand."

The Doctor knelt in front of her. "Second chances."

The girl glanced away. She breathed out her words, low and weary. "Someone very close to you once said, will say, might have said…the first rule about the Doctor," she twitched her head up, "he lies."

The Doctor pushed away from her and shoved his hand into his pocket as a breeze tugged at his coat tails. Silence stretched between them as he looked up at the sky. "After nine hundred years," he said quietly, "you develop a few vices."

He dragged at his ruffled hair and gave a long sigh. "You did not deserve what we did to you. We were better than that, once." The Doctor turned. For a moment, even his lank, battered form could not hide that he was far more than human. The weight of ages sat in his eyes, their deceptively bright surface sheening over terrifying power. "I am a Time Lord, we made you, gave all our nightmares flesh. You are my responsibility."

The girl gave a strange hissing noise and pressed her mouth into a thin line. "Then know this, Lord of Time. You should not have done this thing," she dug her nails into her arm, "because I will kill you."

The Doctor blinked. Then he grinned. "Oh, well, I have no doubt you'll try. You'll find it a bit more difficult now that you can't draw power from a gapping rift in time. It certainly makes you easier to look at, not seeing time bleeding out all over the place." He offered her a weak smile. "Come on then." He held out his hand. The child refused to take it, glaring at him.

The Doctor shrugged. "All right, as you like." He sauntered off down the hill, good hand shoved in his pocket. He managed to work up a whistle.

The girl watched him go. Her gaze roved over the vast expanse of grass and the strange blue sky that hung so high above her head. She wrapped her arms around herself. Shaking, she rose to her feet and spat on the ground, a snarl stretched across her features. She winced, her tentative steps spattering the grass red. With a limping stride she hurried after the Doctor.

He didn't turn around, merely cocked his head as he heard the grass behind him crunching under little feet. He didn't smile then, merely closed his eyes in slow acceptance.

* * *

A/N: Thanks for reading everyone! Please favorite and comment if you like it-or if you see things that could be improved. I've always been fascinated by the mention of the Nightmare Child, and I wish we'd get to know about it in-story, but then again, mystery is part of the fun. I hoped to give some hints as to her origins without spelling out the headcanon I have for her. Thanks again for reading!


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